This War Of Mine turns war survivors’ tales into game design

Looking at war as a civilian rather than a soldier means facing hard truths.

This kind of setting looks very different when you're not a fully decked-out soldier.

The teaser video for This War Of Mine begins with soldiers running through an urban landscape. It’s a deliberate misdirection. This is a game about war, but not about soldiers. It’s not about fighting a war; it's about surviving one—as a civilian.

Using soldiers as protagonists inherently limits the ways video games can discuss the horrors of war. Sure, games like Spec Ops: The Line feature morally questionable decisions, but those decisions are forced on players through the story, sparing the player real culpability and reducing the moral questions to pure horror. It's harder to imagine a game that allows soldier-players to deliberately choose to commit war atrocities. Games like the canceled Six Days in Fallujah, which tried to base in-game events on real battles, are already shouted down by critics as disrespectful.

This War Of Mine skirts these obstacles by dropping the soldier protagonists and instead puts the player in control of a group of civilians trying to survive an urban conflict in a fictional war based on real-life accounts. To capture what war is like from a civilian perspective, developer 11 Bit Studios, based out of Warsaw, Poland, is researching everything from YouTube videos and interviews on Amnesty International to books about the Kosovo War in the late '90s.

"Everything you can see in the game is a translation of real facts into game mechanics,” Pawel Miechowski, senior writer on This War Of Mine, told Ars Technica during a recent preview demo. “We’re still doing research about real conflicts in Sarajevo, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, all the modern conflicts.”

“My grandmother, she passed away a few years ago, long before I started to think about this project, but I can recall her talking about really similar experiences [to those we're trying to capture in the game] during the Nazi occupation,” he continued. “That you need to stay with your family, you need to support one another.”

The game takes place primarily from a black-and-white, 2D, side-on perspective. Players click around to navigate a three-level apartment building-turned-shelter, pockmarked with bullet holes and other scars of combat. As an in-game clock in the corner of the screen ticked down to evening hours, Miechowski called up a map of the surrounding area with other buildings we could search for raw materials.

“One of the most tradable items in the siege of Sarajevo, and other conflicts as well... was alcohol,” said Miechowski, proceeding to show me the parts one could scavenge or trade for to build a still to produce moonshine. “So in the game, you can create alcohol as well. In Sarajevo, people under cover of night were leaving the shelter to trade alcohol for weapons from the military surrounding the city.” Players can nominate survivors to make these sorts of trading runs, or they can scavenge resources and look for other survivors. They can also guard the shelter from bandits.

The nondescript art design is meant to suggest that the game could be taking place in any modern city, Miechowski said. Players will be able to upload photographs of friends and family to represent the survivors, and Miechowski said he wants players to lose themselves in the illusion that anyone could find themselves trapped behind the lines of war.

Enlarge/ The game's creators want you to be able to put photos of real people into the game to make the experience more personal.

How real is too real?

Trying to accurately capture civilian life in wartime raises questions about what narrative lines 11 Bit Studios can afford to cross. “What we’re thinking right now is [adding] the possibility to put kids in the game, because when war breaks out, there are going to be kids as well, right?” said Miechowski. Still, a game where children regularly starve to death or die from illness is going to be a difficult reality to push on players. “There surely will be some compromises, but we’re trying to stay as true as possible to the reality,” Miechowski said.

That statement led me to ask about the possible threat of rape in the game, a serious wartime reality if ever there was one. It’s well documented that Serbian forces used rape as a tactic to inspire ethnic Albanians to flee Kosovo, and sexual violence has been one of the worst weapons used against civilians during war for millennia.

“There are some things that we should cover, but then again the experience is already horrible itself, in terms of on an emotional level, so I’m not sure if we should add such [topics] as rape,” said Miechowski.

I don’t actually want to see rape against survivors in This War Of Mine. But the question of its inclusion gets to whether the game can truly portray war in a frank and serious manner without sacrificing broad appeal. As it stands now, the demo feels like a resource-management survival game that could be taking place in any post-apocalyptic setting, removed from real-life stories specific to the atrocities of war.

This War Of Mine currently seems like a serious game designed for the classroom, to help spur discussion and inspire students to look up accounts that really take the gloves off and present the horrors of war in earnest. The gamemay be based on real-life accounts, but abstracting everything down to game rules may strip away the power of those stories.

The team at 11 Bit Studios faces a difficult balancing act creating a game that really captures the horrors of war for civilians without being too raw for a mass audience. Hopefully, the developer won't be hamstrung by the same old limitations about what parts of a war a video game can or cannot discuss and will be able to really force players into a new perspective on armed conflict.

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston and has been published by Salon, Polygon, and NPR. You can follow him on Twitter: @DennisScimeca.